indiatoday.in

Readiness by lane

Green: indiatoday.in. Thin bar: News & Media peer median.

Priority fixes for indiatoday.in

Ordered by impact and by how common each practice is among peers.

1. Priority 1 · Harden

   HSTS kept for at least a year

   Observed: Strict-Transport-Security was sent with a max-age of 183 days, below the one-year benchmark.

   Why it matters: HSTS tells browsers to use HTTPS for your host on every later visit, which removes the window where a first HTTP request can be intercepted.

   What to do: Send Strict-Transport-Security on HTTPS responses. Start with a short max-age (for example 300 seconds), confirm every subdomain works over HTTPS, then raise it in steps to 31536000. Add includeSubDomains only when all subdomains are HTTPS. HSTS preload is optional and hard to undo; hstspreload.org itself does not recommend it by default.

   On Next.js: Add the header in the headers() option of next.config.js for all routes.

   35% of News & Media peers do this. Limit: Read from the homepage response only; other pages or regions may send different headers.

   Guide: HTTPS and TLS Guide for Website Owners

2. Priority 2 · Accelerate

   Modern image formats in use

   Observed: The homepage had 90 images and none used WebP or AVIF.

   What to do: Serve WebP or AVIF with a JPEG or PNG fallback, either through an image CDN or by generating both formats at build time.

   On Next.js: The next/image component serves optimized formats automatically.

   44% of News & Media peers do this.

   Guide: AVIF, WebP, JPEG, and PNG: Choose the Right Image Format

3. Priority 3 · Harden

   Certificate lifetime of 100 days or less

   Observed: The certificate from DigiCert Inc had a 396-day validity period, longer than the 100-day maximum that applies from March 2027.

   What to do: Move to automated issuance and renewal now, while you still have time to test it.

   66% of News & Media peers do this.

   Guide: HTTPS and TLS Guide for Website Owners

4. Priority 4 · Accelerate

   HTTP/3 advertised

   Observed: The homepage did not advertise HTTP/3 through an Alt-Svc header.

   What to do: Turn on HTTP/3 at your CDN. Browsers fall back to HTTP/2 automatically, so the risk is low.

   36% of News & Media peers do this.

   Guide: CDN Guide for Website Owners

What indiatoday.in already does well

Practices fewer than half of News & Media peers use.

• Content Security Policy presentContent-Security-Policy present.29% of peers
• DMARC policy enforces quarantine or rejectDMARC policy p=reject.37% of peers
• X-Content-Type-Options: nosniffnosniff header present.42% of peers

What we saw

Homepage checked

https://www.indiatoday.in/

Homepage response

HTTP 200

TLS

TLSv1.3, HTTP/2

Certificate

DigiCert, 396-day validity, expiring 2027-02-05

CDN or edge

Akamai

Platform or framework

Next.js

DNS operators

Akamai Edge DNS

HSTS

max-age 183 days

DMARC policy

p=reject

Homepage HTML

1,268 KB, br

Images on homepage

90 (jpg 45, png 4, gif 1)

Limits: homepage only, one location, one moment. Header checks reflect the homepage response; other pages may differ.

Stack and providers

Seen in the homepage response, certificate and DNS. Provider pages compare how their customers configure the same checks.

All 31 checks

Select a gap for the method and fix. How each check works

Compare with other News & Media sites

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• kannadaprabha.com74

News & Media readiness benchmark